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The Nasty Battery Power Usage On Ubuntu 11.10

09-09-2011, 05:00 PM

Phoronix: The Nasty Battery Power Usage On Ubuntu 11.10

This morning I shared some initial battery power consumption results for Ubuntu 11.10 from three different mobile devices. For all three of them, the power consumption on Ubuntu 11.10 was even higher than Ubuntu 11.04, which was already in a power hungry state. Before calling it a week to go handle XDC2011 matters, I ran some tests from a standard Intel Atom N270 netbook. Sure enough, Ubuntu 11.10 is doing a heck of a job at burning through power...

I, for one, love Unity. And its keyboard shortcuts. KDE is a good second but the <meta>+1 to switch between apps is brilliant. I am really productive on it, and apart from the terrible power management I'm actually looking forward to 11.10.

I, for one, love Unity. And its keyboard shortcuts. KDE is a good second but the <meta>+1 to switch between apps is brilliant. I am really productive on it, and apart from the terrible power management I'm actually looking forward to 11.10.

Phoronix has long been bashed because it doesn't care about anything other than Ubuntu. It completely ignores other distros and only focuses on Ubuntu. I don't think it really has anything to do with whether the stories end up being positive or negative.

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I'm fairly certain Fedora has started to be getting more attention, as the distro has been improving to be more common-user friendly.

It might be getting more usable but the default gnome-shell theme is hideous :P unity looks really great IMO, 11.04 was not ready for me yet but the little while I've been testing 11.10 I was satisfied but since I'm going to college soon I'll have to wait until 11.10 hits stable release so that I switch to it from fedora.

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In this case, the power consumption issue is mostly in the kernel. I have an atom processor and I've tried upgrading the kernel to newer versions but....
Everything past .37 consumes a significantly more power. That 20% there is the difference between the fan running quietly and about 2 hours off the battery life.

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It would be nice to have the same tests under optimal conditions, i mean after running power-top git and enabling all of the suggestion it provides, adding pcie_aspm=force, i915.i915_enable_rc6=1 to the kernel boot options.
Personally, after doing that, i have 5,9 -> 6,1W in idle on a netbook with similar spec (asus 1005ha) with kernel 3.0.
Didn't test it under load.

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I bet phoronix has nothing personal to ubuntu, it's just most widely used linux distro. Who needs comparison of netbsd with slakware?

On my laptop btw I cant say I see major power regression, on lucid/maverick with kernel 2.6.34 (custom build) I had
Present rate : 1550 mA
now I have
Present rate : 1377 mA
which is quite compfortable. Of course I have some customisation:

I, for one, love Unity. And its keyboard shortcuts. KDE is a good second but the <meta>+1 to switch between apps is brilliant. I am really productive on it, and apart from the terrible power management I'm actually looking forward to 11.10.

Of course it is distro related. Aside from kernel and power profile settings (which is again a distro decision), the way the user-land behaves (and choices of packages) has a major impact in energy consumptions as well.